Proofreading and Editing Your Content for Non-Native English Speakers
Hi Everyone,
This is a quick post about something I've been noticing as I pop around to a variety of new websites to trade comments. (I'm very grateful for this feature of WA by the way. You all are the only comments I've gotten so far!)
This post is about Proofreading & Editing of your website content. This is especially important for those of you for whom English is not your first language. I love that WA is so international and I've loved meeting people from everywhere here. If writing in English is a bit challenging for you or you have questions about flow, grammar or word choice, I strongly recommend you get some help. Have a native English-speaking friend do a quick proofread for you. I've seen a few blog posts here by generous people offering to help out for free with this. This is a great option.
Proofreading for non-native English writers is something I started doing years ago when I was living in Europe. The reality is that if you are publishing content in English, it can distract from your excellent content if there are too many grammar or other issues.
I'd love to know how you've solved the proofreading problem or if you have a great service to offer.
Wishing everyone tons of success!
Recent Comments
9
As a non-native English speaker I clearly unterstand this issue. Hope the find someone to help me out (friends or within WA?)
You will have no trouble getting help this way. Just ask for help. Do this as a question and make sure your question is succinct so readers know exactly what you need before they click on your question to answer it. Many people open your question and then put something like 'I don't know the answer' or 'I can't help'. this is frustration because when the question is listed in the 'activity' section it looks like you have received an answer not a non-answer!
Since you are new here try out my training re emails Emails, Are You Drowning in Them! . If you follow this then you don't get your email box stuffed with WA stuff as it will go into the 'activities' and 'notifications' that show just under the 'need help' box. For your questions just look in the activity box and you can see if you have an answer and how many.
Have fun.
I hope you find the help you need Chris! I do it as a side business (it's my only income right now) - I wish I had time to help people out for free, but I do not. Sometimes all you need is a quick look through by a native speaker. Best of luck!
Sarah
Sarah, I certainly agree with this proofreading business. I often offer to do this but few take me up on it. Sometimes I just do one and PM it to people. These often thank me. It's not hard to ask for help and I would rather read a post or page than have to wade through it guessing what is meant.
I also visited your site and left a message. I too lived in the Pacific North West - Canadian side of the border. I am now going to follow you so I can see what other interesting stuff you post.
Hi Helen! Thanks for chiming in on this. That's so great that you offer to help people. I haven't done this - don't really have time right now since I'm scrambling a bit to get some $ coming in on a few fronts :}
I will check out your site as well. Thanks so much for commenting. I'll head over soon to respond! I was just in White Rock in November. We basically had coffee and then came home, but I love Canada.
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I've been thinking of ways to offer suggestions in this area. It's tough when I read a site with great content but chock full of grammatical errors.
I was thinking maybe someone might use a service like Fiverr for low cost.
It won't let me post the search result but I searched:
https://www.fiverr.com/
for "editing english text", for example.